This Gay Rights Group Wants The Supreme Court To Shut It Down

This article by Amanda Terkel was originally published on March 23, 2015 in The Huffington Post. Read the full article here.

If everything goes as he hopes, Evan Wolfson will soon be out of a job.

Wolfson, 58, is widely considered a key architect of the marriage equality movement. In 2003, he started Freedom to Marry to campaign for national recognition of same-sex marriage.

On April 28, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in four cases that could settle for once and for all whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. A decision is expected in late June.

"Assuming we do win the long-sought, hard-fought victory in June, Freedom to Marry -- this campaign -- will have achieved its mission," Wolfson told The Huffington Post in a recent sit-down interview. "And we will end the campaign. We will close down."

"So just roughly speaking, assuming we win in June, I would expect that a year from now, I'll be out of a job," he added.

Wolfson underscored several times that he's not taking anything for granted until June, seeming almost nervous that even talking about victory might jinx the outcome he's fighting for.

"I hope you will really make clear that we're going 100 percent full steam, we are winning, but winning is not won, and it's not a done deal until it's done," he stressed. "So we're not getting over-confident or cocky or anything. We have a lot of work to do."

Wolfson's involvement in the marriage movement started long before 2003. He's been called "the Paul Revere of marriage" for going around the country and telling everyone that marriage equality is coming -- even at times when LGBT advocates thought the possibility was remote.

As a student at Harvard Law in 1983, he developed one of the earliest arguments for why legalizing same-sex marriage was crucial to winning broader equality for gay Americans.

And in 1993, when the Hawaii Supreme Court became the first appellate court in history to rule fully in favor of marriage equality, Wolfson was one of the two lawyers representing the victorious couples. (Hawaii voters later passed a constitutional amendment overturning the decision, although the governor and the legislature came together in 2013 to finally legalize same-sex marriage in the state.)

Read the full article at The Huffington Post.